Page 15 - Myths for the Masses An Essay on Mass Communication

Mass Communication and the Promise of Democracy

appears in the effects of media fare that produces a manageable or
controllable social formation.
The current practice of mass communication confirms the dom-
inance of a private, commercial agenda in a democratic culture that
has failed to deliver on the promise of participation, which seemed
to have been intended when mass communication – in the language
of the confident middle class – stood for liberation and represented
the road to enlightenment and freedom. In the meantime, the media
do not belong to the people, yet people need media for access to
knowledge about themselves and the world, while the media must
deliver audiences to meet commercial demands for a functioning
regime of consumption.
Moreover, since media have replaced “the other” in a historical
process of alienation and isolation that characterizes industrializa-
tion, the new relationship is shaped by the commercialization of
mass communication. Consequently, individuals discover their selves
in a process of consumption that matches the expectations of a
mass-mediated reality rather than in conversations with the other.
Furthermore, the process of communication itself is being under-
mined with the introduction of virtual realities, for instance, in
which individuals are isolated from others and converse with
themselves.
And yet, the rise of mass communication is also tied to a real-
ization of the centrality of communication in social settings and the
extension of media practices that affect private and public behav-
ior; it prospers with the growth of literacy and the spread of uni-
versal education, and bursts forth as a way of life with the popularity
of mass-mediated experiences as a modern alternative to self-
expression. Consequently, mass communication is the discourse of
society, which defines, organizes, and determines life in its social or
political manifestations.
Mass communication was also instrumental in the twentieth-
century crusade of modernity, where it remained a key element
in the unfolding of the future. It reveals a philosophy of change
in action that promises enlightenment while pushing at the bound-
aries of the imagination of a captive public. Mass communica-
tion rises to become an irreplaceable cultural representation of the
age.

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